Eli & the 13th Confession

Who here remembers Woolworth's record section? Perhaps I should ask, who remembers F.W. Woolworth? since it already seems so long ago that the retail behemoth folded. Their record section was a bit hit and miss – rather like their Pick 'n' Mix confectionery section – but occasional trawls yielded the odd treasure.

The Belfast branch was more comprehensive than most, but I picked up Eli for about a pound in 1973 in the Bath store. We'd just moved back across the water and it was a difficult period of transition, but I was able to take it with me to Sandon Hall, near Stafford, where I landed a job as an assistant archivist working for the deeply eccentric 6^th Earl of Harrowby, may God rest his antiquated soul. An octogenarian at the time, he wanted to give a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to a young person from war-torn Belfast to work in his trouble-free stately home. I didn't go into too much detail about our fairly comfortable tree-lined existence in the capital of Norn Iron.

At the end of most working days, I'd lie on my bed between my Wharfedale Denton speakers, light up a Consulate menthol cigarette, as cool as a mountain stream, and listen in depth to an album. Eli was often creeping around my room. 'Eli's a comin/Whoa you better hide your heart/your lovin heart/Eli's a comin and the cards say/broken heart...'

Just a little too young to be a full-blown hippy, I was nevertheless deeply in love with Laura Nyro, as many flower children were. On the cover of Eli, she is depicted as some exotic, fragile pre-Raphaelite creature. With her alabaster face, her long black hair and matching robes, she was almost a cross between Snow White and Lily Munster or Morticia Addams. A wistful, pensive Lady of the Sorrows, she and her soulful music struck many a chord deep within my delicate teenage being.

Labelled a 'folk-soul' singer at the time – probably because she was white and female and therefore had to be a folk singer – Laura Nyro was, in my book, nothing less than the greatest white soul singer of our time. Often overlooked or underestimated during her short, reclusive life, she nevertheless influenced everyone, it seems, from Elton John and Ricky Lee Jones to Todd Rundgren and, err, Alice Cooper. Finally and inevitably she was given her dues when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. And not before time!

I came to Eli five years after its release in 1968. However, I'd already treated myself to Christmas and the Beads of Sweat in 1971 and New York Tendaberry the following year. So convinced was I that the three albums were conceived as some kind of trilogy, I wrote an extended essay about the notion for the American Arts element of my English degree. My tutors, though, were singularly underwhelmed by my big idea.

In any case, Eli knocks spots off the other two. Tendaberry is a rather harrowing soul-searching affair at times, while Christmas is a slightly uneven affair, despite the presence of wonderful songs like 'When I was a freeport and you were the main drag' (and what on earth was that all about?) and a version of Gerry Goffin and Carole King's 'Up on the roof', which ironically – given that King was probably her number 1 rival when it came to writing catchy soulful pop songs for herself and for others – would prove to be her biggest-selling single.

In fact, Laura Nyro was also a wonderful interpreter of other people's songs. Gonna Take a Miracle, for example, recorded with Labelle and produced by the Phillysound creators, Gamble & Huff, is a delicious album of what she called 'teenage heartbeat songs': entirely non-original material that includes storming versions of 'Jimmy Mack' and 'Nowhere to Run', which are right up there with Martha Reeves & the Vandellas' Motown originals. And that's really sayin' something.

But Eli is uniquely her own work and, like her First Songs, laced with hits for others. The title track was recorded by Three Dog Night and 'Sweet Blindness' and 'Stoned Soul Picnic' by the 5^th Dimension, who interpreted so many of her songs that they were almost the equivalent of Dionne Warwick to Burt Bacharach. I burdened our shelving with a CD from an Emmaus depot by the British jazz singer, Clare Teal, simply for another version of 'Stoned Soul Picnic'. Nice as it is, it doesn't come close to the sheer euphoria of Laura's original. 'Red yellow honey sassafras and moonshine...' Every time I hear it, I still want to surry on down to that stoned soul picnic.

Certain things are particularly noticeable on re-visiting the album. While she can write a catchy melody as well as just about anyone, there are some quite daring shifts in both melody and time signature (in songs like 'Poverty Train') that betray the jazz influences from her childhood. And while the music surely qualifies as pure soul, with all the double-tracked sections of call and response, it's perhaps closest to the gospel-soul of Mavis Staples.

The music, too, is often downright funky. It was clearly recorded with a crack team of musicians (Christmas was made with the Muscle Shoals crew and I'm guessing that Eli probably involved top New York-based session musicians like guitarist, Chuck Rainey, and drummer, Bernard 'Pretty' Purdie), but it's her self-taught piano that's frequently the funkiest cylinder in the engine.

Some find Laura Nyro's voice too screechy for comfort. It's true that I find it hard to listen to, say, Lorraine Ellison's 'Stay with me, baby' or anything much by my daughter's erstwhile favourites, Florence & The Machine, because of the hyper-charged emotion of the vocals. But although Laura's highest register can occasionally be a little unnerving, what I hear is a passionate but beautifully modulated and genuinely soulful voice.

She shied away from the public eye and didn't play many live concerts. They could be very intimate affairs and she was reputedly booed off stage at the same overblown Monterrey Festival that launched Otis Redding to a mass audience, so that would have certainly reinforced her natural reticence to perform. After a long hiatus when her popularity dimmed with the quality of her music, she fortunately shook off her creative malaise to release a crop of fine albums towards the end of a too brief career.

Nero or Nairo? I used to argue for the former with any classmates who could be bothered to debate such trivia at school. Nyro was an assumed name, anyway, and we'll probably never know for sure now. She was passionate about animal rights, a committed feminist and general champion of the underdog. For all the joy inherent in her catchiest tunes, there was always a dark and sorrowful side to her music, so it's perhaps not surprising that she met a tragic fate. She died of ovarian cancer like her mother before her at the same age of 49.

My wife specialises in generational work with her clients. A few sessions with her might have given Laura Nyro a bit more time on this 'brown earth'. I suppose we at least have the records. Eli & the 13^th Confession probably rates as her finest 40 minutes or so in a recording studio. Go listen or nip out and buy the anthology. Immerse yourself in her oeuvre!

It was easy, It was cheap, Go and do it!

[Rather than the label 'with special guest star(s)...', French music concerts seem to use the term 'invites...', as in Sacha Distel invite Charles Aznavour, which I think is rather nice. The first time I saw Manu Dibango in France, for example, the Cameroonian saxophonist invited some celebrated accordionist – whose name I have forgotten – to justify his appearance at the annual Nuits de Nacre festival in Tulle, a celebration of the accordion and associated music.

Anyway... from the outset, I invited people to contribute to this here space and the first person to take me up on the offer, my first special guest star, is my dear old friend, Roger Trew. I met up with Roger on our first day at Exeter University. We were a pair of mannish boys. He had hair down almost to his bum and a matching beard and I thought, This guy looks a cool sort of bloke to hang out with. We sat through an interminable opening ceremony together and discovered a mutual love of English literature, football, music and other male-oriented-pastimes (or MOPs, as they are commonly known). Being a long-haired hippy, Roger used to get chased around his stamping ground of Gants Hill, London, by local skinheads and other bully boys. Ironically though, and being a man of impeccable taste in music, Roger was digging the kind of music that the boot-boys would have appreciated: the likes of The Upsetters, The Pioneers and Harry J & the All Stars.

Like me, Roger can't play a note of music – but he did work in the industry for a few years in the '80s and he certainly knows his musical onions. So, without further ado, All the way from York, England, will you welcome please...]

When Mark invited me to contribute to his inspirational lavievieenalbums blog, my initial reaction was to dig out the crates of vinyl, and pluck out that one album that shaped my future tastes; it proved to be an impossible task. Who’s to say whether it was This is Soul, Motown Chartbusters vol 3 or Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake? And it also seemed a distraction from Mark's personal journey. It’s never a good idea to have two people arguing over directions.

Perhaps I could provide my own observations on his journey, some of which is uncannily close to mine. That was easy enough with Nice Enough to Eat, but Mark had precocious tastes. Whilst he was grooving to Stan Getz, I was still waiting for the next Hollies single. So I ditched my ‘We need to talk about Marvin’ article, and thought again.

Then it struck; going back over his choices, what most of them had in common was an excellent label behind them (Island, Tamla, Verve, Bizarre, etc.). Labels are something I know a little bit about, having worked with Rough Trade Distribution for a short period in the eighties. Rough Trade, 4AD, Factory and Mute were my lifeblood, along with Greensleeves, On-U-Sound and Ace and its many sub-divisions. Each had its own character and idiosyncrasies, and each expanded the musical landscape.

Of course, these weren’t the first independent labels. Sun Records, Verve and others were around in the fifties, and whilst not all were completely independent, they were allowed great freedoms by their parent labels, and were certainly infused by an independent spirit. Elektra followed, and Chess, Stax and Tamla weren’t far behind. Chris Blackwell’s Island launched at the turn of the sixties, and Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate, both with an eye on the British music scene, followed a few years later. In response to Island’s signing of some of the key artists of the late sixties, a number of the major labels fashioned their own ‘boutique’ labels to attract the more ‘progressive’ rock acts. Labels such as Harvest, Vertigo (with its attractive 3D label), Track, Deram and Blue Horizon became the home of the British counter-culture.

Amongst Mark’s choices, even CBS could lay claim to being massively influential, giving us Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkel and the wonderful Laura Nyro, none of them having been previously recorded elsewhere. And, with reference to Nice Enough to Eat, CBS also provided us with the first of those ‘underground’ budget compilations, The Rock Machine Turns You On, featuring many of those named artists.

If Mark agrees [Yes, I most certainly do. Ed.], I would like to provide an occasional column that looks more closely at some of these labels. It is not my aim to provide a comprehensive history of the ‘independent’ label or even a coherent overview, but similar to Mark’s approach, to choose the labels (and the people behind them), that have some significance for me, and hopefully for you.

Now, where have I put that Desperate Bicycles single?

Caravanserai

It starts with the by now, for me at least, familiar sound of crickets scratching their back legs together (or whatever it is that these insects do to create such an evocative choral), presumably on some sun-drenched savannah grassland rather than a Lotois lawn. Enter a lone tenor saxophone, sounding like the wail of one of those interminably long goods trains that lumber across the American continent. Then mix in some deep resonant double bass, some echoing electric guitar and finally a crisp metronomic drum refrain. Add shaker bells – et voilà! It's pure jazz.

Listening to 'Eternal Caravan of Reincarnation' (whose title pre-figures Carlos Santana's coming preoccupations with Sri 'Chimney' and all that eastern spiritual stuff) reminds me why a childhood friend was prepared to swap Caravanserai for my almost pristine copy of The Groundhogs' Thank Christ for the Bomb. That was back in 1973 and I know who got the better deal. I've got nothing against The Groundhogs: Tony McPhee was a very decent blues guitarist, but his voice was limited, to put it kindly, and I doubt very much whether my friend Ian is still listening to it now.

Whereas I'm still listening to what I consider to be Santana's finest hour and still enjoying it as much as ever 40 years down the road. My friend Ian was not and probably never would be a 'jazzer'. We used to play 'bin-ball' in the car park of an architectural practice in the entry that separated the back gardens of our two parallel tree-lined avenues in middle-class Belfast. It was a form of two-a-side football with upturned dustbins as goals. The small target for our shots meant that there was little margin for error and crucially no need for goalkeepers. My brother earned the nickname of 'bin-ball wizard' primarily for a semi-legal tactic of 'tunnelling' against the wall of the architects' back yard, which the brothers Bamford tried unsuccessfully to outlaw.

We graduated from bin-ball to Subbuteo and I think it was during an away match in the Bamfords' upstairs sitting room that we effected the exchange. Santana's fourth album is still here in the shelves and I'm still as happy as Larry with my swap. Yes, I can understand Ian's disappointment. Anyone expecting more 'Samba Pa Ti' would have to wait until well into the second track for even a burst of Senor Santana's trademark crying guitar. There are no vocals until the fourth track, the brief 'Just in Time to see the Sun'.

As one track segues into another on Caravanserai's first side you appreciate that the album is less about Santana the guitar hero (as they would tend to become much later in his career) and more about Santana the band – and on this album especially the stellar three-pronged percussion attack of James Mingo Lewis on congas, José Chepito Areas on timbales and the splendid Michael Shrieve on trap drums.

After the guitarist's showcase on 'Song of the Wind', the first side ends with the dramatic ensemble work-out of 'All the Love of the Universe', which might lead you to anticipate that the second side couldn't live up to the first. Sure enough, I used to write down 'Future Primitive', the opener on Side 2, as a little too... primitive for my developing taste. I would lift the arm across it and let it drop on the second track. Now it's just about my numero uno: a minimalist masterpiece built around a deep reverberating organ note à la Sun Ra and some spacey guitar motifs before a dialogue of two sets of congas rises then subsides to leave only the guitar and the initial organ drone.

It segues into the album's only non-original number: a delicious version of Antonio Carlos Jobim's 'Stone Flower' with words added by Santana and Shrieve and a juicy double bass rather than the electric model. Then comes the fast and furious 'La Fuente del Ritmo', which gave me an excuse to sit between the speakers and listen to Carlos soup-up the guitar and fire notes from left to channel to right and back again.

If Side 1 ended with a bang rather than a whimper, the band pulled out all the stops to close the album. 'Every Step of the Way' features some frantic flute, a barrage of percussion and some full-throttle blistering guitar all backed by the horns of a big band. It's an album that goes on giving. Perusing the sparse liner notes earlier, I noticed for the first time that the supplementary musicians on the finale were orchestrated by Tom Harrell, one of the finest jazz trumpeters of recent decades.

Maybe there's nothing quite as catchy here as 'Evil Ways', but Caravanserai clearly confirms what a monster of a band Santana were. That performance at Woodstock was no flash in the pan. For me, it's their most consistently satisfying album and a fine example of what would become much later in life my first musical love: Latin jazz.

I only hope that Ian is still enjoying Thank Christ for the Bomb as much as I'm still diggin' some classic Santana.